Because there aren't enough goddamn blogs on education.
Tom Bennett, founder of researchED, author, and behaviour advisor to the DfE writes the words the spirit animals tell him to, here.

At the recent researchED in Haninge Sweden, I closed the conference with a speech that tried to understand where we had got to in evidence informed education, and what the landscape looked like. The following is a summary of that speech:

The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, at least it does in education, where we see teaching full of myths, and poorly evidenced practices and strategies. Why have we succumbed so much to Learning Styles and worse, and why have we found ourselves basing our vital practice on gut feelings, hunches and intuition? I think it’s because misconceptions creep into the spaces where:

we don’t know much about the topic,

we like the answers junk science provides, or

we’re too busy to find out the facts.

How did we get here? Let’s reframe that question. Where did you acquire your ideas about teaching, learning, pedagogy etc? Chances are your answer revolves around: teacher training; memories of your own school experience; your mentor; your early class experiences.

Up to a point that’s fine. Teaching is to a great extent a craft. But craft without structured evidence to interrogate its biases and misconceptions can lead to folk teaching, where we reproduce the mistakes of our predecessors as easily as we do their successes.

So what? Because merely ‘folk teaching’ leaves us at the mercy of snake oil, fads, fashions, ideology, bias. We can think of an ocean of cargo cult voodoo that often dominated educational discourse in the past: Shift Happens; TED talks; the great Interactive Whiteboard con; most links you see shared on Facebook. We recall the training days hosted by inexpert experts; the books by charismatic gurus; the often quoted rentagobs that fill TV, radio and print who seem to know so much about classrooms despite never having worked in one, know nothings, elevated by other know nothings.

In this landscape, discussions about teaching becomes a battle of prejudices- Pokemon debates where we simply hurl one unprovable claim against another until someone blinks.

A new hope?

My naive ambition in 2013 when I began researchED was simple: we should lean on evidence where it exists, we should try to become more research literate as a profession, and crucially we should ask for evidence at every turn. That was as far as I had gotten, strategy-wise. But surprisingly, amazingly, researchED took off, despite its lack of blueprint or funding. It was a movement that wanted to happen, and we started to respond to demand by hosting events across the UK and quickly, around the world. Since then we have been to 9 countries, 4 continents, and seen 15,000 unique visitors to our events. researchED has 22,000 followers on twitter, and we have been graced with 1000 speakers, none of whom are paid. It is a humbling testimony to what can be achieved for next to nothing if love and altruism and mutual benefit are all you want to achieve. And it reminds me of the best in people, always.

The dangers of research

But it is important to always retain a sense a caution alongside the enthusiasm. The sleep of reason produces monsters, even with good intentions. There have been some reasonable responses and criticisms of this new age of evidence enquiry:

I’m busy- Good point. Teachers rarely have the time to read research, practice it, translate it. Which is why I rarely recommend teachers become researchers. Often, in-class research is of little use anyway. Research takes time and training. I want teachers to be bad researchers about as much as I want researchers to pretend they are teachers. So we need to become more evidence facing collectively, in partnership with other institutions.You don’t need to know anything at all about research to be a good teacher. Also true. But we now live in an ecosystem where we need to be able to respond to people who claim evidence is on their side.Research can prove anything you want to. No it can’t. Not all research is equal; there is worse evidence and better evidence, and discerning which is which is heart of the task we face.Teaching is practical, research is abstract/ Teaching isn’t a science: no indeed, not entirely. But it isn’t wholly an art form either. It is amenable to structured investigation. It works in the material as well as the mental world. There are many aspects of it which can, must be analysed

Less reasonable responses: you must be funded by HYDRA; this is a neoliberal conspiracy; evidence is just another way to deprofessionalise teachers/ make them robots. At these I can only roll my eyes so hard they threaten to detach from their nervous tethers. Customers of tin-foil milliners will believe what they choose despite an absence of any evidence because they want to. No one makes a button from this, and no one funds it with any control. No one gets a say about speakers or content, and we are guided by the desire to seek the truth and fuelled by altruism. Strangely, I see popular snake oil salespeople paid for by Unilever and governments who escape this approbation, often because what they say pleases the conspiracists. Fancy that!

Evidence in the wild

Bad research- the ‘not even wrong’ categories like Learning Styles- aren’t the only problem. What happens to evidence in the wild is crucial. One thing this has taught me is that high quality research is, by itself not enough. If it doesn’t reach the classroom in a useful state then it may as well not have happened. And often good research gets lost in translation. I call this the Magic Mirror. Sometimes research goes through the mirror and schools turn it into something else. Research translation is as important as research generation. Poor old Assessment for Learning drops into the Black Box and becomes levelled homework and termly tests, weird mutant versions of what it was meant to be. And some research is simply misunderstood: project based learning, homework, collaborative learning all have utility in the right contexts. But how many teachers know the nuance of their evidence bases? Homework , for example, has variable utility depending on circumstances. Grasping the when and the how of ‘what works’ is essential, otherwise we over simplify.

A brave new world that hath such teachers in it

I think researchED is a symptom of a new age of evidence interest. Perhaps also a catalyst- one of many that now exist, from the Deans for Impact to the Learning Scientists to the Five for Five program and many more. This is indicative of an appetite that was always there. We now host more conferences, visit more countries every year. We have more first timers, both attendees and speakers. Like the can of worms opened, the worms cannot now go back in the can. This car has no reverse gear. Successful innovations, once perceived, cannot be unseen.

Policy makers

I once asked Tony Blair what research he relied on when making education decisions. He replied that there ‘wasn’t any useful evidence at the time.’ This attitude still dominates the biggest lever-pullers. We still see at a policy level multiple factors driving decisions away from evidence bases:

Budgets

Policy/ ministerial churn

Lack of insider representation

Reliance on personal experiences

But the more the profession talks the language of evidence, the more they will have to listen to it. And I have always believed that we should reward policy makers when they participate in evidence driven discussions. That’s why I’m proud we try to engage rather than barrack our political representatives. And why every year we invite minsters of every party to our party.

Schools

Leadership is still the biggest lever in driving evidence adoption. One evidence literate school leader cascades far more than one teacher. Some schools are now embracing the research lead role, and devoting staff resources to this area. There is a moral and a practical duty for leadership to attend to evidence, because an era of dwindling resources demands better, more efficient decisions- less waste, more impact, from training to workload to tech. Let us abandon the days we tried to buy our way out of our problems, as if a chequebook was a magic lamp. And I sometimes wonder if raising budgets isn’t by itself insufficient, because what we do with the money we have is more important than the act of sending it unwisely.

Teachers

In the absence of a coherent, evidence informed system it is necessary for teachers to drive their own research articulacy. It is necessary. Teachers should not be pseudo-researchers, but they should become literate; share, disseminate and interpret high quality research, and help us to develop a herd immunity, where enough of us are learned enough to recognise the zombie learning and junk pedagogy when it rises- as it always does- from the grave.

Embrace ambiguity

We have one more duty to observe. Teachers must become active participants in the research ecosystem rather than massive recipients. But teaching is driven by practice, and the data is more subtle than we suspect. We often seek definite answers where none exist. Research often unpacks ambiguity, and we need to embrace nuance, uncertainty and probability rather than dress high quality research up as eternal and immutable fact. We should avoid universals and certainty- and seek always remember that context is frequently king. Otherwise we perpetuate dogma, and become that which we seek to surpass.

The Gate Keepers

One thing I didn’t expect- but should have- is that the existing system objects to its own reinvention. Whenever power shifts, former custodians of power seek to preserve privilege, and this new age of evidence adoption has frequently been dismissed by some academics, some education faculties, commercial interests, some teaching bodies. But the habit of command dies slowly. Education has relied on arguments from authority for decades. Evidence challenges their dominance like mystics challenge the Church. I have faith that evidence and truth will win, but it will not be because it was easy. Arguments must be made; evidence bases must be made transparent.

Evidence doesn't obliterate professionalism it liberates it.

We enter a new age of evidence. Once seen it cannot be unseen, and science cannot be uninvented, although ideas can change. Fears that evidence makes us slaves to research are no more rational than the fear that understanding how to cook makes you a worse chef. It empowers. If you object to where evidence takes us, then find better evidence. Otherwise, ask yourself if your opinion is dogma, or something more animates your objections.

Caveat Emptor. In a complex field we need interpreters and brokers of research, but we must also take care not to create a new priesthood- the neo-Shamans of evidence, who act as irrefutable guardians of divine truth. The OECD, for example, in some ways has become the new international inspectorate, blessing or banishing entire countries on the basis of their data. Is this healthy? I don’t think so. Beware also the New Generation of Consultants selling ‘Snake Oil 2.0’ who have updated their absurdities by simply stapling the phrase ‘evidence based’ onto their bags of magic beans. And don’t think I’m ignoring the danger of researchED succumbing to this, like mortal ring bearers corrupted by Sauron. Which is why we curate events to include challenge and debate, like the grit in the oyster that helps to make the pearl.

The future

We begin to see new models of professional groupings emerge- digital collaborations, conference communities that no longer require permission to exist, and precious little capital. Self propelled, self sustaining, self regulating, they exist only as long as people want to go. These fluid, accessible, dynamic, virtual colleges are needed until they are no longer needed because the profession will have reinvented itself. We’re not there yet. Which is why we commit to cheap, accessible events that are democratic, inclusive and most of all, directed at discovering what works- and when, and why, and how.

My ambition is that we start to drive this voluntary professional development, which then cascades back into schools and starts conversations that starts sparks in classrooms that catch fire and burn down dogma. That initial teacher training makes evidence its foundation (where it does not do so already), platforming the best of what we know rather than perpetuating the best of what we prefer. For new teachers to be given skills to discern good evidence from bad. For that to bleed eventually into leadership and from there into the structures that govern us.

I’m reminded of the story about the eternal battle between darkness and light in the night sky. A pessimist could look up and think that darkness was nearly everywhere. But the optimist doesn’t see that. The optimist knows that, once there was only darkness.

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It’s still a wonderful jobNb: this is an edited version of a previously published post

I usually have a Christmas ritual: I republish a post I wrote a few years ago called ‘It’s a wonderful job.’ It was a Winter rumination about why teaching was still one of the best jobs you could do, despite the aggro and the paperwork and rats carrying lasers*. It was a sentimental meditation, me on my rocking chair smoking a pipe and chuckling as I read Christmas cards from cherubic children.

Love, Actually says at Christmas you have to tell the truth. This year it would feel insincere to regurgitate so straightforward a love letter to the profession- mainly because since September last year I’m not teaching. Four years ago I started researchED as a kitchen table project, and I ran it on top of full time teaching for 18 months until the banjo string of my psyche threatened to snap. So I went part time. researchED grew and grew, more and more conferences in more and more countries and continents, but my kitchen table stayed the same size and once again my head started to feel like the Jumanji box. Nikki Morgan asked me to lead a behaviour review. The day stubbornly refused to expand past 24 hours.

I knew something had to give when I returned from researchED Melbourne, stepped off the plane at Heathrow and cabbed it to school for my period one class in Dagenham like Act Three of a Richard Curtis caper. I’m amazed by how much you can achieve when you really boot it, but there comes a point when you’re spreading your jam too thin and all you can taste is toast (which is what I was rapidly becoming- last year, after 3 years of researchEDing, I hit a wall, and a virus robbed me of the use of my hands for a few days- exacerbated, I was told by a specialist, by overwork. Who knew?)

So I made a decision to reign in the breadth and focus on doing less things better. It was undoubtedly the right thing to do, the sensible thing and already I’ve been able to bring in another behaviour report, and rebuild researchED in many ways- out notably by launching researched magazine in March 2018.... I have a lot to be grateful for.

So why do I still miss it? Why is there this phantom limb of a job that I have to remind myself I no longer do? That’s easy to answer.

Teaching saved me. I don’t exaggerate. I changed careers late- from running night clubs to student whispering at 30. I had lost my way so comprehensively in my 20s that I no longer even conceived of a straight path through the crooked places in which I worked. Never underestimate the damnably slow dissolution by attrition that desperation and lack of purpose can have on a busy mind. Waking up every day with the feeling that there was something I was supposed to be doing, but undone.

As Henry David Thoreau is often misquoted, ‘Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and die with their song still inside them.’ That echoes. So does Chandler with his ‘Somebody get me off this frozen star.’ Through no one’s fault but my own, and squandering my launch pad of good schooling and family, I meandered for so long I ended up barely managing; existing, not living. I do not believe this to be uncommon.

Now I have a purpose HO HO HO

And then came teaching. It was as if, undeserved, Willy Wonka’s Golden Ticket had landed on my mat. Suddenly, meaning, purpose, challenge and the chance to serve an end greater than oneself. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs lit up for me like a fairground try-your-strength hit by a giant’s mallet. The job was maddening at first, and so hard it nearly broke me. But giving up was inconceivable, because I was home, doing the thing I knew I should have been doing. The universe is indifferent to our petty melodrama, but if it wasn’t I would say that I was where the universe needed me to be- and when. I claim no expertise or proficiency, just the intuitive certainty of being in the right place at the right time, like John McClane’s luckier cousin.

And I’ve never doubted that. Life’s aim isn’t to be happy- heroin will serve just as well- but to flourish, as the Greeks would put it; to be usefully engaged with integrity, and fulfil your own conception of destiny in a community. Teaching frequently made me unhappy, with its turbulence and drudgery and melodrama, but it fed a hunger that could be sated in no other way.

And it is a hard job. Too many teachers still steer with difficulty past the gnashing, clashing Scylla and Charybdises of difficult behaviour and the Sisyphean problem of workload. Policy churn, syllabuses that strobe past in succession, gimmick-learning, illiteracy…the list of bear traps and pitfalls to the perfect classroom can be summoned in an instant.

But it is still a wonderful job. There are few other roles where you can intersect so meaningfully with another’s life; where you can be a small but significant link in a chain that leads to the benefit of others. Where you can give them a gift that really does go on forever, that never runs out, never needs new batteries, and can’t be returned: an education. To some children it can seem like finding a tangerine in their stocking, but it’s not: it’s stardust. Where else can you help children become adults, and students become scholars?

I said this in my previous blog post:

‘…. It isn't a job where you punch out at five o'clock; this is a vocation, like the priesthood or the circus. You have to love your subject, love working with kids, and love teaching them. If you don't, you won't ever be truly happy doing it. But if you do, then diamonds and rubies.

You might never transform every child's life, but that's not the benchmark of good teaching. You do your best, and you give them the best damn education you can. You provide them with safety, support, and discipline and tough love. You do your best. And mark this: your best will not always be enough and you will fail, and children will pass through your care and fall off the map, seemingly no better for having encountered you. But many of them will be helped, and some of them will be helped a lot. We play the odds. We play a long game.

…As supporting characters in the melodramas of the lives of others, we are required to ask one simple question: do we want to help, or harm? Everything else follows from that. Like George Bailey after his illumination, I am grateful every day for the chance to play the smallest part in the lives of other humans. That, dear friends, is why… I feel like running down the High Street of Anytown, America, wishing everyone a Merry Christmas and laughing in the face of Mr Potter.’

Come in, and know me better

I don’t know if I’m on a sabbatical or a one way night flight to Venus, never to know staff party and dinner queues again. But education gets in your blood; that’s why you see so many families with three generations or more of teachers. Scientists in the future will probably discover a gene. Right now I think I’m where the Universe needs me to be.

And the universe needs a lot more teachers far better than I to fill the gap and more besides. Retention is in a mess, and it won’t get any better if the only message people hear is how difficult it is. I mean, it is, and these things need to be said often and loudly without restraint. But these violent delights have violent ends. It has become dangerously fashionable to forget that, amongst the struggle and the strife in the classroom, it really, really is a wonderful job too.

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The following blog post was first featuredon the TES website in April 2015. Unfortunately due to a technical problem, it didn't survive an update. I've tracked and captured it using a site that archives web page snapshots, in response to several requests from people who wanted to link to it in their own writing. I present it here, exactly as it was, so please bear in mind the context of the time in which it was written.

Tom

Evidence-based education is dead — long live evidence-informed education: Thoughts on Dylan Wiliam

Dylan Wiliam, high priest of black boxes and emeritus professor at the Institute of Education, says in this week’s TES that teaching cannot, will never be a research-based, or research-led profession. And he’s absolutely right.

Given that he’s the one of the handful of educational researchers that many teachers could name, and I happen to run researchED, education’s grooviest new hipster/nerd movement, this may appear to be the greatest act of turkeys voting for Christmas imaginable. Let me scrape the cranberry off my wings and I’ll describe why Wiliam is spot on, in a way that needs to be repeated often and loudly.

Education won’t be cured by research alone, nor should we expect it to. BUT HANG ON,TOM I see you type with the caps lock on, ISN’T researchED ALL ABOUT THAT? No, and it never was. Funnily enough, most people forget that my experience of research was initially almost entirely negative; I’d swallowed so much snake oil in VAK and similar that I retched my rage into a book, Teacher Proof, in which I flicked Vs at most of what I’d been told solemnly was gospel.

It was only through my work with researchED, and reaching into the research ecosystem, that I got a fairer picture of what was really going on: good, bad and ugly research papers flying around in a tornado, like a library with no index. Quality was no guarantee of status. I saw a huge opportunity for teachers, researchers, and every other inhabitant of the research ecosystem to talk and listen to each other. ResearchED was born, and it’s what I’ve tried to do since: raise research literacy in the teaching profession, promote conversations between communities, cast out the bad, encourage the good.

And Dylan Wiliam has been an important part of that conversation. Here’s my summary of what he said in this week’s TES, and why he was right to say it:

1. Research can’t tell you what could be

Wiliam uses grouping by ability as an example. Research seems to indicate that this "produces gains for high achievers at the expense of losses for low achievers". In other words, it helps one group to the detriment of another. So, for many, this means they should stop setting or streaming. But what this doesn't tell us, Wiliam points out, is why this happens, or ways in which grouping by ability might produce more desirable results. Top sets are often assigned strong teachers, or more senior teachers, which could explain the outcome gap. I remember taking a bottom set through GCSE for two years; normally I was assigned the top sets. At the end of the two years I had (on paper, that most chameleon of awards) value-added scores through the roof. That’s because it’s a lot easier to get a kid from a U to a F than it is to turn an A into an A*. So setting has hidden issues that are only apparent at a classroom and school level. Maybe grouping by ability can work, maybe it can’t. It depends on context.

One significant issue is that studies of human behaviour such as the Education Endowment Foundation Teaching and Learning Toolkit, requires an enormous amount of contextual nuance in order to appreciate what it is really telling us. Large randomised controlled trials, huge metastudies, are extremely useful ways of finding things out, but they have equally large limitations. They can, if taken at headline value, conceal huge amounts of detail, buried on page 2, 3 and beyond. According to the Toolkit, Teaching Assistants are an expensive intervention to make for children, with low or limited impact. Because of that, may schools have simply dropped TAs from their staff cohort, as if the matter were settled. But we all know TAs who have transformed the learning of children, even if taken as a cohort their impact is averaged out to a low value.

These studies can tell us the big picture of what is happening, but they often fail to suggest why, or in what conditions and contexts valuable results are obtained. In short, they can’t tell us if this precise TA will have an impact on that class, or child. As Wiliam mentions, this is because such studies frequently fail to take into account the relationship between pupil and educator. Interventions aren’t aspirins; they occur between people, and forgetting that the relationship between people is fundamental to the outcomes of the intervention is as shortsighted as assuming that two people will fall in love because they're available and fertile.

2. Research is rarely clear enough by itself to guide action

Wiliam talks about feedback (maybe you heard of Assessment for Learning? He might have had a hand in that…). Feedback, broadly speaking, has a positive correlation with improved learning outcomes. But any kind of feedback? And how does that feedback land with the student? Telling a child who hates you they’ve done well with their use of metaphor might well discourage them from using it again. Telling a child who hates public praise that they’re the cream in your assessment coffee could lead to unexpected results. How you give feedback, and the relationship between the feeder and the fed is crucial. But most studies of feedback simply look at feedback as a collective entity, a solid and coherent intervention.

The headline of this piece is correct, but needs unpacking: it’s deluded to expect research to form the basis of teaching; it isn’t deluded to use it to improve the practice of education. For a start Wiliam would be talking himself out of a job. He even closes the third act of his piece with, "So how do we build expertise in teachers? Research on expertise in general indicates that it is the result of at least ten years of deliberate practice…"

Teachers should be rightly suspicious when they’re told ‘research proves’. In order to do that, it’s necessary for a significant portion of the teaching community to be reasonably research literate — enough to generate a form of herd immunity — both in content and methodology. Then, they can reach out to and engage with research which can assist their decision making. I say ‘assist’ carefully.

That doesn’t mean make their decisions for them; that doesn’t mean it’s a trump card. Teachers need to interact with what the best evidence is saying and translate it through the lens of their experience. If it concurs, then that itself is significant. If it clashes, then that’s an interesting launch platform for a conversation. Teaching is not, and can never be a research-based, or research-led profession. Research can’t tell us what the right questions to ask are, nor can it authoritatively speak for all circumstances and contexts. That’s what human judgment, nous and professional, collective wisdom is for. But it can act as a commentary to what we do. It can expose flaws in our own biases. It can reveal possible prejudices and dogma in our thinking and methods. It can assist bringing together the shared wisdom of the teaching community. It can act a commentary to what we do. It can and should be nothing less than the attempt to systematically approach what we know about education, and understand it in a structured way.

Teaching can — and needs to be — research informed, possibly research augmented. The craft, the art of it, is at the heart of it. Working out what works also means working out what we mean by ‘works’, and where science, heart and wisdom overlap and where they don’t.

There were many common themes (because all students are humans, with human capacities, appetites and reactions) many different ways these themes were achieved (because context matters, and few things in human behaviour are universal). Detail matters.

One of the most commonly encountered strategies was the use of well-described routines, defined, embedded and maintained by an alert and consistent staff, and self-sustained by the community of students. For routines to work, they have to be consistent. There need to be understood exceptions, and exceptions need to be exceptional, rational and coherent with the culture. Laws are laws but without room for wise interpretation they become prisons rather than climbing frames.

Elitist or Inclusive?

One of the most common worries people have is the fear that such environments aren’t inclusive. That they, by their nature, exclude pupils with special needs, vulnerable pupils, and those facing intrinsic and extrinsic challenges, from trauma to dyslexia.

It’s a reasonable fear- after all, if a behaviour system aims to high expectations for all, what happens when some can't reach as far? And if a system’s only response to failure to reach those expectations is a process of escalating sanctions leading to a terminal evacuation, don’t such practises inherently lean towards expulsions and the marginalisation of already marginalised children?

Thankfully, these fears are only realised if these systems are run badly, with no care for detail, context or nuance. I was inspired by a comment made by John d’Abbro, head of New Rush Hall, a special school in Ilford, Essex:

Good behaviour management is the same in special schools as it is in mainstream- high expectations, routines, consequences, and showing the kids you give a damn.

And that’s what we found. The fundamentals of a well-run school:

A) Apply as much to alternative provision as mainstream schools/ students
B) Benefit all students e.g. through structure, routine

These fundamentals include:

Embedding social norms, such as values of compassion or politeness

High expectations that demonstrate the faith the school has in every pupil

Unconditional professional regard for the well being and potential of every student

Structure is perhaps one of the most important aspects that a school can most obviously attend to. Because structure benefits all pupils, those with special needs and those without. But structure also disproportionately benefits the most vulnerable and in need: looked after pupils, in the care of the state; students with learning difficulties, autism; the least able; the socially dislocated; refugees.

The School as an Ark

Well-structured schools are also an Ark: a safe haven from otherwise turbulent and difficult circumstances. This is because:

•School can provide structure that may be absent in other aspects of their lives
•It may be the safest, most stable place they know
•Well-structured schools minimise bullying
•Signs of mental health issues can be noticed and tackled more easily in quiet, calm spaces
•Calm environments minimise stress, triggers for poor behaviour or trauma

Plan for behaviour- get in front of it

Charlie Taylor, a former head teacher of The Willows, a school for children with complex behavioural, emotional and social difficulties, said:

‘Too often school leaders and teachers don’t think about behaviour when it’s good. They only think about it when it’s bad, which is counter-intuitive. When they have not thought about it and planned effectively they are disabled by the behaviour of just a few students. Planning for each individual child is vital especially when setting behaviour goals. Teachers just react to the child’s misbehaviour rather than having planned strategies in place.’

He was talking about special provision, but the lesson applies equally to all pupils. It is vital that a school gets in front of behavioural difficulties before they manifest. Nowhere is this more urgently needed than with children with special needs. By the time we react to their reactions, it is often too late to help; we need to help them before they need it, before their needs exceed their capacity to self-regulate.

But do high expectations exclude rather than include?

Quite the opposite. Because special circumstances deserve special provision, and the wise school care for such contexts. We think nothing of ramp access for students needing wheelchairs; no one is witless enough to query why a paraplegic isn’t running the 400m in PE. Such remedies and accommodations are easily understood. Pupils and sometimes schools struggle with the same reasoning when impairment, disabilities or difficulties are invisible to the eye.

High expectations are crucial to the teacher/ pupil relationship. This is because:

High expectations indicate a regard for the dignity of the student, and shows faith in their potential to improve

However, many pupils with SEN suffer from disadvantages the make meeting absolute social norms more difficult than it would be otherwise.

Reasonable accommodations must be made for such pupils. This is not to be seen as a failure of law and structure, but the realisation of it as a lived, organic aspect of a moral culture. Special circumstances demand special responses.

At the same time as these accommodations are made, we scaffold ways to improve; we demonstrate them clearly; we monitor the progress exactly as we would monitor academic progress.

Responding to challenging behaviour.

At the same time we need to acknowledge that routines and accommodations are not enough; that we need a mature system of responses ready when behaviour falls below our expectation. All schools need a behaviour feedback mechanism, often called a consequence system. But that is what it is- feedback for pupil behaviour. That feedback can be:

Designed to encourage towards behaviour we would like to see repeated. This is usually interpreted as rewards. The most valuable and available reward is usually sincere, targeted, proportionate praise. Other feedback in this category would be encouragement, verbal or otherwise. Demonstrating a pupil’s efforts as an exemplar to their peer group is often a valuable experience for a pupil.

Designed to discourage. Deterrence is an essential part of managing behaviour. The knowledge that sanctions (for example) are possible is a subtle yet powerful framing device to many people’s actions. Despite our wishes for it to be otherwise, no community can sustain itself for long without a sense that a) boundaries exist and b) consequences are attached to breaking them. Certainty of sanction is far more important than severity. Diminishing gains are achieved by ignoring either side of this maxim. Inconsistency is corrosive to the trust between teacher and student. Learning to trust and rely on a teacher’s integrity and dependability is key to developing that relationship. Exceptions must be allowed, but exceptions must be rational, explicable, and exceptional.

Supportive. Pupils might need help to overcome literacy difficulties, lack of baseline knowledge, conceptual issues with topics, or broader counselling or formal/ informal support with problems at home or their community. These can range from child protection issues, to medical needs, to issues connected to poverty or neglect, deliberate or otherwise. But support need not be aimed at remedying some lack; it can also be nurturing a talent, designing a program for gifted students; developing an interest or study area parallel to the curriculum.

Neutral: sometimes, doing nothing is what is needed most. A pupil on task, working hard, focused on their endeavours, needs to be left to pursue their task to its conclusion. Not acting is itself an action.

Of course, feedback on pupil behaviour can have several simultaneous aims: a pupil can be reprimanded and given remedial lessons on reading comprehension; rewarded and left alone. Learning where and how to blend these responses, in what proportions and intensity or duration, and in what contexts, is a crucial part of developing a professional teacher’s judgement.

Zero tolerance, or ‘no excuses’ has little place in an effective behaviour culture, because no law is exempt from exception. However we can say that some behaviours are particularly intolerable and should never be permitted: racism, cruelty or abuse, for example. But many rules and routines will have genuine mitigating circumstances, however infrequent. To pre-empt wisdom with blunt certainty is to ignore the complexity of the human sphere. That said, extremely low levels of tolerance should be characteristic of good behaviour systems, and high expectations. Students of all abilities should be encouraged to, where possible, take responsibility for their actions, and learn strategies that help them to flourish as people and scholars. Accommodations must be made for students who are genuinely unable to meet behavioural expectations, for example due to a diagnosed learning difficulty.

Simultaneously, it must not be assumed that, in the absence of such a diagnosis, a pupil is helpless. Where possible we should encourage pupils to see themselves as having agency in both their personal identity, their immediate sphere, and their lives more broadly. Developing pupil autonomy is a key aspect of nurturing their emergent adult identities, along with appreciating responsibility, being critical consumers of information, and making decisions that will benefit themselves and others.

True Inclusion

Inclusion does not mean ‘in the classroom at all costs’. Many needs are best met (temporarily or longer-term) outside of the mainstream classroom, where specialist help and feedback can be more easily addressed. This should always aim towards inclusion and re-integration through, e.g. nurture groups, literacy coaching, counselling, transition programs etc.

Removal from the classroom

This is often necessary when the behaviour of a pupil exceeds the capacity of classroom staff to manage, or when the lesson becomes impossible to deliver due to the disruption of one or several pupils. In this instance removal is a positive strategy, not a failure. However, the following points must be considered carefully:

When pupils are removed from mainstream classes, their reintegration must involve a transition conversation/ activity that sketches what the pupil must do in order to improve, and an understanding of what went wrong previously

Periods out of the classroom must be characterised by meaningful learning activities that are purposeful and designed to facilitate reintegration

Where possible, no ‘holding pens’. Simply removing and returning is highly ineffective. However where the class’s education is being immediately affected, it can be considered temporarily as a stop gap measure.

With these, and many other strategies and principles, the good of the many and the few can be simultaneously appreciated and improved. Apart from the effort required to implement consistent routines with high expectations that permit reasonable accommodations (and depending on the cohort and their needs it can be a Herculean effort), this is one of the most rational, rewarding investments a teacher or school leader can make in their community.

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There’s a weird thing I hear sometimes from staff in a school. They say, ‘Oh the School should do x,’ or they’ll say in front of a student, ‘This school is rubbish.’ Students have mentioned to me how odd this sounds- as far as they're concerned the teacher IS the school, or a cell in it at least. When you hear this kind of comment, you know that the school identity is fractured.

I feel a similar way when schools talk about ‘the community’ as if they were some quarantined island, a geosphere hovering above the neighbourhoods. The school student body is overwhelmingly built from the geography of its postcode. The school is part of the community. It can try to put up a drawbridge, but it gets stormed every minute they’re open.

It’s easy to make the mistake that a school is like a supermarket where the students visit, pick up a bag of trigonometry, and leave. But it’s also an alternate dimension in their lives, that intersects messily with home and friends. And they overlap in turn, back with the school. Like the Observer Effect, it is impossible to observe a particle without affecting it. Like Osmosis, when two cells sit together, they swap matter between them. It’s not only abysses that gaze back at us when we stare. It’s other people.

I learned a long time ago that when you work with the public, expect them to drag their entire lives into your short relationships; sometimes the angry customer isn’t upset with you, but at the fact their car broke down on the way. Scratch beneath the surface of any group, and a millimetre beneath the surface lie oceans of tragedy and complexity. And how children behave in schools is enormously governed by what lies beneath.

This week showed that in technicolour. We meet Mia, a 15 year-old looking forward to both her GCSE exams and the birth of a child in the same trimester; Kodie, a school refuser teetering on the edge of dropping out, despite her obvious brains, and Katelyn, a powder keg of emotion, working out, as we all have to, who she is.

Here we see how a school is- or can be- much more than the supermarket. Mia’s family were visited at home to support where she needed to be. You could see the strain on her mum’s face, determined to make sure her daughter’s life didn't stop because of the baby. Her faith and hope for better things was touching and universal, as was Mia’s sincere and obvious joy at the prospect of being a mother. An imperfect scenario probably, but when does life grant us that luxury? We are where we are. With the school’s help, where Mia was looked a bit brighter.

Kodie struggled with other demons; loss, bereavement, anger and frustration, which she took out on herself, and her school career. Her grandfather was a living saint, raising her and being the parent she needed. It became apparent that Kodie was much more than the ‘bother’ she appeared to be; that, with support and the nudge early enough, her trajectory could be pointed at the stars instead of the launch pad. Teaching, you see a lot of girls like Kodie who appear, on the surface, to be primarily a strain. But what lies beneath? Potential is a cheap word- we all have potential. But if we all have potential, then schools need to believe in that potential, and help create it, rather than sculpt it from some imaginary clay.

What is an ecosystem?

And Katelyn, an avatar of anger, bouncing in and out of lessons like a pinball, raging and wailing in quick succession, host to a legion of emotions that she probably can't name or explain herself. When I started teaching I saw that kind of behaviour as nothing but need; it seemed selfish, a parasite on the host of the class, draining my resources from where they needed to be It took me a while to realise that their need was very much my business- as was everyone else’s. That doesn't mean give everything to one at the expense of the many. We have to perform a utilitarian calculus- what can I afford to give to each one? But that is where the greater school community comes in. Teachers cannot manage these situations all by themselves. Often, even the school cannot. But the school as a whole has a greater chance to do so than any one of us. And that’s at the heart of what communities are for.

No hospital turns away a patient for being ‘too ill.’ Similarly no school should bin a pupil for being too needy. I’ve been privileged to see a lot of schools; the best of them make every effort they can to include those who need us the most. That attitude bleeds into its attitude to all pupils: everyone matters here.

Love me tender

Of course, resources are finite, and there are a great many arguments in favour of increasing resources: mental health support, behaviour management, conflict resolution, and many more. But schools do what they can, and this school certainly did. Safeguarding teams, home visits, referrals to CAMHS, endless meetings, mentoring, curriculum adjustments, counselling. Schools are villages inside the communities within which they reside. Messy circumstances don't beget easy solutions, but here we saw some of the fruit of their endeavours, slowly slowly sprouting from the ground. Not answers, but the promise of answers; Katelyn responding to Mr Ince’s lessons, Kodie promising to give school ‘one more try’. If you read the press recently and heard about schools that sweep unwelcome students out to protect their exam results you would boil at this complete degradation of the purpose of schools, and education in general. Compare that ghastly project with what Harrop Fold attempt to do here, with what most schools try to do every day of the year.

Schools do not perform the obvious miracles of the eye surgeon or fire fighter: the blind given sight, the lost soul saved from harm. But we are blessed with the peculiar honour of being a link in the chain of their lives, and sometimes an important one. Often, transformational ones. The catch is that we often never know until years later, which means we often never know. But I know that at the end of this episode at least, Mia gave birth, and eventually went to College. Katelyn went in and out of school, now back, and Kodie got 8 GCSEs. And some of that was down to the school. And that’s not bad.

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Every successful series has a problem: carry on until everyone hates you (see: 24), or leave them panting (see: Mad Men). Remember Happy Days, the once-world-conquering period sitcom that outstayed its welcome, and desperate to keep feeding laxatives to the goose with the golden eggs, wrote the cast into new, odd narratives. Magical midget mojo Love God The Fonz memorably ended up water skiing over a shark, in scenes as far removed from his character's core as Freddy Krueger baking cupcakes in Justin’s House. The phrase ‘jumped the shark’ was born, and has not, as yet, jumped the shark itself.

So, has the Educating [insert geographical locale] series jumped the shark? Not yet, if this season's opener is anything to go by. Previous series had been entertaining, often moving, but there was a sense that after their spectacular Essex opening act featuring teacher demi gods like the Buddha of empathy Vic Goddard and Stephen Drew, shoeless standards Samurai, subsequent seasons were photocopies of the last one. Yorkshire (when you’ve watched them as closely as I have, you get to dispense with formalities) defined the high tide of the series’ emotional aspirations as it brought us the unforgettable combination of Musharaf, the adorable teenager who could, and his sardonic, witty mentor Mr Burton who helped him start to overcome his stammer. East End and Cardiff were very good teacher telly indeed, but there are only so many times you can watch the Broken Child Healed By Hope (BCHH) without wondering if there were any other stories to tell.

Thankfully, it feels like- so far- there’s been an attempt to mine more subtle seams. And so they should. There are a thousand pebbles and diamonds in every school, and we need only pick one up and look at it from a new angle. So, what's new?

Clear off, scumbags

Well, it's geographically accurate this time: Salford is indeed Greater Manchester, although it leads to an lumpy title. Maybe they should have sick with Manchester and just borne the apoplexy of purists on social media.

But better, this time the series has started to look at something that every school serving pluralistic communities knows too much about: racism. And more: bullying, intolerance, and the often unpleasant views that live a millimetre beneath the skin of many pupils- and sometimes, staff. This was a huge risk for the producers to take, and an even greater one for the school. There is a little to be gained from participating in this fixed-rig circus, and much to lose. Even Goddard, who came out looking like Moses, admitted that there were swings to each roundabout. Add to this gelignite soup the need to safeguard the students, and we have a rhino pogo-sticking blindfolded through a minefield in the DMZ.

But I think they pulled it off. Migration, integration, and the concomitant possibility of disharmony are the narrative equivalent of playing Operation! drunk. It’s like Eastenders, home to the only East End pub and market where no one uses racist epithets. Maybe understandably. I’ve been to dozens of schools where ethnicity determined community, and worse, defined territory, perceived antagonisms and loyalties. I’ve seen students openly drop racism bombs you hoped had died out with the Doodlebug, and more commonly, heard students unquestioningly trot out the anxieties and callous pieties they could only have learned at their own hearths. I teach Religious Studies and Philosophy so for years I’ve heard pupils express and examine these beliefs, sometimes, openly, sometimes secretly. So I’m not shocked to hear the values and truths pupils often cleave to. I’m just surprised it’s taken so long for TV to get near it.

We meet Mr Povey, this season’s Head teacher, who looks like a haunted Tom Cruise. Every Educating [x] head has this Cromwellian certainty in their eyes, fathomless ambition and enthusiasm. Which is understandable given how mad you would have to be put your heart’s work under a microscope like this. He drives in (with his bruvvers, no less) to Harrop Fold School which has struggled with debt and achievement issues, but now looks poised to flourish.

Remember, Vic: you make the weather

'I feel the need...for GCSEs'

This week we were introduced to Rani, a boy newly arrived (last term) from Syria with his famly. One can only imagine the desperation that drives a family to leave, possibly forever, from the land of their ancestors. Some kids, when asked what they did last Summer, talk about Thorpe Park and Camber Sands; Rani spoke about seeing guns, violence, explosions every day. And even in his refuge, he had walked into further indignity: bullying, the defining vice of the vicious. We saw Ms Bland, head of student support, trying to mend the brittle shoots of Rani’s embryonic relationships with his aggressors. It’s a delicate, fragile thing to do: over mentor and the boy never grows past his shadow; under support and he's crushed by the combine harvester of cruel circumstance.

We saw a carousel of talking heads, which I thought was interesting. Some pupils expressed sympathy with their migrant classmates, but it was remarkable how quickly some of their views turned to traditional bogeyman saws like housing, jobs. No kid ever worried immigrants are coming to take their jobs, just grown ups. And of course, every one of those kids had names you could trace back to migration, recent or historical. Not a Pict or Ancient Briton among them.

One girl even said, kindly, ‘We’re all in the same boat,’ which was sincere and compassionate. But others arrived on entirely different boats, like Murad in year 10, also from Syria. A Kurd from Alleppo, he arrived on a two-hour night raft to Cyrpus. ‘You didn't know if you were going to die,’ he said.

And the most difficult thing for him that he remembered when he arrived? ‘Bullies’, he said without hesitation. Can you imagine that? After running from Hell and braving a second watery Hell to do so, the thing that stood out the most from his arrival was the ghastly tribalism of people who should have been his neighbours and his hosts. I get a strange feeling of shame when I hear about guests and the newly arrived to these shores encountering random, idiotic cruelties and capriciousness, as if some unspoken law of hospitality had been breached. New additions to our communities deserve better.

And good schools like Harrop Fold do their best to make that come true. Murad was assigned to Rani as a mentor, and the sincerity of his desire to nurture and protect the wide-eyed new kid was touching. ‘if anyone touch you you tell me, he said, and suddenly Rani had the coolest, tallest bodyguard a boy could with for.

The school helped even more by putting Rani, not in at the deep end, but through a nurture group for the first few weeks to help him acclimatise. In a scene designed to slay UKIPers everywhere with rage, he even took the class through Salah, the ritual Muslim sequence of prayer. Five years ago that would have been the headline in the tabloids the day after. This time, nothing. Maybe that's progress.

Meet the Fockers

Jack and Rani: original new crime drama from ITV this autumn

Then, it was time for him to graduate to mainstream lessons. Would he be ready? Was school ready for him? Happily it was, in no small part due to the superhuman conviviality and congeniality of Jack, an equally tiny avatar of hospitality and welcome. Jack was one of those rare kids who walks towards the lonely, shy, marginalised kid instead of walking away, or worse, walking through him. His persistent, gentle hand of friendship is the stuff Disney films are made of. No wonder the pair of them toured the telly breakfast sofas all last week. And then we saw Rani’s final upgrade: the proof we needed that he was one of the gang and ready for bear: unbidden, he went up to a grimy utility van in the playground and finger painted the word FOCK on the sooty back door panel, like a miniature Stan Boardman. No matter how badly behaved it is, that is never not funny. That broke the dam, and within seconds the van was covered in the ubiquitous cartoon phallus (variant: spurting lava) and every other swear word known to school boy.

Mr Povey did his nut. Rightly. Life is full of paradoxes. Cartoon knobs and FOCK have a comedy that endures until the stars run cold, and vandalism can’t be tolerated in a civil community. I loved his turmoil spilling out in interview as he acknowledged that he probably did a few like that in his own time, but…That’s the burden of adulthood, alas. You think it’s going to be all staying up late and Christmas Cake for breakfast. Instead you end up telling kids off for writing 'Wash me'.

And from a behavioural point if view, what he then did was interesting: he shouted for ‘every student who drew on the van’ to turn themselves in. And amazingly about half a dozen did. Now call me an optimist but that's some kind of healthy community he has there if students are so good they’ll 'fess up when they don't have to. Even Rani started to beetle towards the doom of honest boys until his mates- for they were now his mates- stopped him. ‘You didn't even write on it!’ they reasoned, believing themselves as they said it. And Rani learned a lesson about double-think, and getting away with it. He probably deserved it.

Talking of hositality, Jacks mum seemed as lovely as he was, and in the Salford rain, she invited Rani back for tea at their house. Putting the kettle on might not solve all the world’s problems, but that and a plate of oven chips and pizza appeared to be a good start.

Hurt is a funny thing; it is oten given without intention through ignorance as much as will. At a support group for EAL students, the calm and kind Murad stormed out when a Polish girl, upon hearing that immigration had taken his fingerprints on arrival, said it was ‘Like a terrorist.' His anger was coming from an angry place- how often had he had to endure insults based on his colour or religion, revolving around such words? Who could blame him for living on a hair trigger? But the girl herself was remorseful, explaining that all she meant was ‘they were treating him like a terrorist.’ Neither of them meant badly, and yet when lives are suffused with mistrust, bullying and victimisation, it is easy for common situations to appear menacing.

The lesson, I think, from such situations is to acknowledge that meaning well is often not enough; that we need to work hard to consciously avoid walking into such bear traps. But even as adults this is hard. And when worlds collide, as they so frequently do due to war, budget travel, migration, and the goad of survival, it is all we can do to be patient with one another, try to think the best of each other, and to, whenever we can, love our neighbours as ourselves. Even- or especially- when those neighbours are the alien.

Other Highlights:

Mr Povey exclaiming 'Sue's Sexy Soup!' in the lunch queue, to no one in particular.

Rani, when asked how long he would be best friends with Jack: 'Until year 11!' he said. So, there you go Jack: binned for A-levels.

Big eyebrows still very much being a thing at the time of filming. Bailey lives, yet.

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I think it’s important, once in a while, to write about what researchED stands for. It’s important to continually define ourselves, in order not to be misrepresented or misunderstood. Recently some people have asked me where researchED stands on a number of issues, and I am glad to do so.

One of these is representation at conferences. It shouldn't need saying that conferences should represent the communities they serve; but then, many things that shouldn't need saying do need saying, and if we take them for granted, others will create new, bleaker narratives.

So, to be carved in the side of the wall:

researchED welcomes submissions from all people regardless of ethnicity, sexuality, or gender. We particularly welcome submissions from under-represented peoples or groups, considering all such submissions equally. In order to redress historical and cultural misrepresentation, I would urge anyone reading this to encourage any members of underrepresented groups who wish to, to send me a session submission. It would help us to improve representation, (and on a personal note I would welcome the expansion of my networks for future conferences). And we will always endeavour to increase our efforts to improve representation as we grow.

A shorter versions of this is already to be found on the submission page of the researchED website here, and an expanded update will be added shortly to clarify our position.

Representation at conferences

I also acknowledge that as a white man working in the education sector, my own immediate networks are overwhelmingly white. This isn't unusual for many; the term sunset segregation was coined to describe the process where people would often learn, work and travel in highly diverse communities, but when it was time to go home, went back to their often very mono-ethnic communities. While this might be a reasonably instinctive phenomenon, I believe it has no place in a formally organised public event, which should be as representative of the communities it serves as possible.

In the initial year or so of researchED I struggled with breaking past my own immediate networks, and if I’m honest, it probably wasn't as close to the front of my mind as it should have been. In addition there is a problem of representation in the broader educational community (see below). But talking to great educators like Alom Shaha and David McQueen in the UK, and listening to Dr Anthony Dillon and Charlotte Pezaro about this had a significant impact on me, and opened my eyes to the urgency of the matter. At first it was hard to accept that such an obvious thing had been overlooked, however accidentally. Since then it is part of my thinking process for every event, and I’m grateful for the guidance that many people have offered in this matter. I endeavour to do better with each conference as we grow.

I’m delighted to say that our efforts have borne some fruit. Our national conference has just over 140 speakers and 100 sessions. Over 11% of those sessions are presented by people from BAME communities, which at least begins to approach the 2011 census of 13/14% of the UK population, and higher than BAME representation in teaching posts (7.6%) and far higher than the sadly low 3% of BAME representation at leadership level, let alone the terrifying statistic of 0.4% of UK professor posts. The gender representation is almost exactly 50/50. researchED isn’t entitled to any medals for this- it should be automatic. But importantly, it is something we care deeply about, and every co-organiser I work with will testify that it is a routine agenda item in our every discussion. And I’m delighted that it is.

Our mission is to break things

researchED delights in debate, changing paradigms, and helping to generate a polite revolution in the classroom. I started it because I believed passionately- and still do- that education needs a revival, if not a reboot. It labours under so many false dogma and uninformed suppositions that in many ways it resembles medicine in the 18th century, when the doctor’s authority was privileged, and his hunch was the final word. Just as medicine finally succumbed to empirical science, so too should education- as an aid to our decisions, not as an authoritarian mosaic tablet. It should intersect with our every action, so that when evidence is available we use it to inform our pedagogy and policy rather than stifle it. Bogus fads like Learning Styles and Brain Gym are the least of it; wild, unchecked pseudoscience abounds, untested, unrestrained. It is still possible for a teacher to be told that group work is the best way for children to learn, without any consideration of when, and where and how it might be applicable. teacher talk is reviled, despite the enormous amount of research that suggests that careful, dialogic teacher talk is one of the most effective ways to convey information that is then retained. There are many more example of such things. None of these matters are settled, but every educator should be entitled to hear the evidence on both sides and make up their minds. on the matter.

As such, we often provoke strong reactions, particularly from people who might feel their orthodoxies are being challenged. Sometimes this leads to pointless conflict when discussion would be better; to personalised insults rather than ‘let’s talk. researchED is a machine to create change for the better. Change always means knocking a few things over.

No tolerance for intolerance

But, as Karl Popper wrote in ‘The Open Society and its Enemies, 'As paradoxical as it may seem, defending tolerance requires to not tolerate intolerance.’ It is undesirable for any opinion to be expressed without limitation. This is not to suppress the right to hold unpopular opinions, but to acknowledge that in a pluralistic society, any right can come into conflict with other rights. One things researchED will never tolerate is racism. Specifically (in light of recent discussions) the idea that any ethnicity is in any way inferior to another, morally, genetically or in dignity is both factually false and morally repugnant to the principles of researchED. And I know of no research or evidence that indicates otherwise. As educators, our duty is to remove barriers to achievement, not reinforce them; to liberate rather than collaborate in enslavement,

There is of course significant evidence of differences in outcomes for different ethnicities: SAT scores, sentence lengths, imprisonment rates, salary outcomes etc. But these raw data point to societal inequity, circumstantial inequalities, and contextual issues, rather than to an intrinsic personal lack. More importantly, it points to areas in which we need to improve; where we need to find the invisible chains that hold certain strata back, and break those chains from here to Kingdom come. That is the duty of the educator, and it is the duty of everyone in education to enable. And it is researchED’s duty. I would not have anyone speak at the conference on the matter if I thought they thought otherwise. Better evidence in these areas can help us to right these wrongs.

Riches in Heaven

researchED has no staff or significant funding; I started it four years ago on the back of a huge amount of enthusiasm, love and support from many, many people who gave their time freely to help make it happen. Access has always been at the forefront of what we do, and I was determined to make sure that as many people as possible could come. Almost all events are on a Saturday so that employment issues are reduced as a barrier. We run a free creche at the larger events so that parenthood doesn’t prohibit attendance. Most importantly, ticket prices are rock bottom to try to reduce income as a barrier to attendance. Most of our conferences cost around £25 to attend, which includes lunch, coffee and a full program of some of the world’s top voices in education. Most teacher ‘training’ days I see charge upwards of £250-£400 to attend. I wanted to break that mould and make it easy for educators to meet with research generators in useful and symbiotic discussion. I wanted to break down some barriers between those who investigate and those who are investigated.

To some extent I think we’ve succeeded. In one room you might have a government minister taking questions of the evidence base of their latest policy, and next door there might be a teaching assistant discussing how she launched journal clubs at her school. I love that sense of levelling, of democratic representation that it embodies. It’s just one way that teacher (or educator) voice can be platformed.

Hail Hydra

One issue we currently face is, ironically, one of too-rapid success. We now run about 15 conferences a year, on three continents in 7 or 8 countries. Our national conference has around 1000 attendees this year. And we still have no staff, no capital. Allegations that we must be secretly funded in some way by shadowy conglomerates and HYDRAs make me sigh, wearily, when I wonder if I can pay my mortgage in three months time. But I love running it too much, and I believe in what researchED stands for too much, to let that be an impediment. As long as I am able I’ll support it. I’m incredibly fortunate to work with a small army of volunteers who give up their spare time to help make it happen, and without them, this wouldn't exist.

But this incredibly thread-bare model that has somehow, inexplicably worked for the last few years, means that organisationally we lack the capacity to operate in the way that better funded bodies with spare staff do. I work every day of the week, often way after midnight, just to keep up with the admin, and the decision making. I couldn't do it if the reward wasn't immense, but we are still an army of enthusiasts, and while we may look like a large corporation with committees and subcommittees, it is still largely me and a few volunteers stuffing bags on a Friday night. I hope we can be forgiven some of our frailties that we sometimes appear a little rough round the edges.

False profits of education

There is no profit in researchED, and because I vowed to keep ticket prices low, for the last few years the only way I’ve been able to break even is by accepting sponsorship support from a huge variety of sources. All of our co-sponsors are listed on the website event pages, and they vary from event to event. We’ve been generously supported by a magazine of sources: charities, unions, publishers, research organisations, government institutions…and all with this condition: no one gets a say over who we select to present. We maintain complete editorial and curatorial independence at all of our events. Plus, having so many sponsors means that we experience no financial pressure from any one of them. researchED is driven by moral concerns, not financial ones.

The great thing about being zero profit is that it means we can keep costs low AND it means that people are far more willing to help out for free, whether by speaking, or running a room, or handing out fliers. It’s been amazing to see what is possible with love, determination, and a sense of achieving a public, common good.

A tall poppy?

We welcome informed and positive feedback to help us improve, and I'm grateful to many of the people who contacted me recently, most of whom did so in a collegiate and collaborative way. Do other events receive as much scrutiny over this? I don't know. I think if I’m honest I suspect some of the less positive scrutiny is because researchED represents a challenge to the status quo in education. We want to reform education for all children and teachers. We want every child taught in as evidence-informed a manner as possible. That means change from what we do at present; and many do not like change. We also represent an unashamedly empirical attitude in our sessions, and many do not like that either, preferring other approaches. It’s a big world and there are room for lots of kinds of conferences, and I have no objection to any of them existing. But we must allow plurality of viewpoint in the education system.

And you know who benefits most from working with evidence? Children. And of them, who benefits most? The least advantaged. Those with no second chances, no tutors, no jobs waiting for them in publishing no matter how they do. The children who are poor, marginalised, miles away from the opportunities and privileges of the elite. They are the ones who need this the most. It is our duty to over turn every dogma we have, obtain the best evidence we can, and turn that into rocket fuel for the ones that need it the most. Evidence informed education is the best vehicle for that I can think of.

And that's what researchED stands for, and continues to stand for, and always will. I hope to see you at a future conference where together we can pull down the moon an inch at a time.

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Australia is an extraordinary place to come, especially if
you’re British. The mixture of instant familiarity (driving on the left as all
civilised peoples do, fried breakfasts, Cockney phonics buried inside carefree New
World idiom) and the novel (dim sum next to baked beans, a menagerie of animals
apparently constructed by God for a dare) creates an uncanny valley. Like you
woke up in an alternate timeline where Britain was at once sunny, healthy and
positive.

Nowhere I this demonstrated more clearly than in that totem
of Terra Australis, the humble Tim Tam. I can summarise it in two words: Aussie
Penguin (the biscuit, not the improbable saviours of zoos’ balance sheets). I
already have orders from three separate people in the UK for boxes of them,
like Antipodean contraband). But it’s a Penguin with an x factor I can’t quite
name. A twist of vanilla perhaps, like someone sent a Penguin through a
teleporter with a 99. And it is very delicious, an Umpty Candy for our age.

Aussie ed reminds me of this. I’ve been fortunate enough to
eke my way across several countries with researchED in my knapsack: Sweden,
Norway, USA, Netherlands, Australia, and next year possibly Ireland, South
Korea, New Zealand- we’re even in talks with schools in the UAE and Spain.
Every time I’m fascinated to discover how education plays out in each
territory. It’s like foreign tongues: the vocabulary and grammar are frequently
alien, but the underlying conventions of language remain. Every country appears
to be wrestling with many of the same devils as every other country.

In some ways, this is unsurprising: the process of educating
children has evolved as a societal necessity, and certain conventions emerge
and converge due to circumstances universal to the human condition: the
classroom, the teacher-expert, the taxonomy of curriculum, testing,
certification, graduation, the lingua franca of instruction. As organisms
evolve circulatory, respiratory, excretory systems in a ticker tape of styles,
education throws up the same issue whether the school bells sounds over Doha or
Dunfermline. Autonomy; selection; instruction and enquiry; whole child or
subject…these and many others are the wrestling rings of debate.

Which is why I’ve found attending researchEDs aboard so
incredibly instructive; the same debates with different accents, angles and
nuance. Educational tourism is of course a dangerous game; often we find that
what propels a perceived outcome (such as literacy or tertiary education
enrolment) can be aligned as much with cultural contextual factors (such as
teacher status, simplicity of language forms, social norms about university) as
with policy levers and school systems.

But if we are careful we can learn from one another. The key
caveat is to remember that correlation is not causation; that constant
conjunction of two factors (such as waking up with a sore head and it being
Saturday morning) may not be causal. So when we visit Singapore, or Finland we
avoid drawing simple inferences about school starting age, bean bags, first
name terms with teachers and wraparound tutoring and classes of 75. Some plants
look beautiful in a jungle, but need imported soil and sunlight to thrive.
British classrooms are not terrariums. Mango trees will not last a winter in
Regent’s Park.

And other flora and fauna will. Look at rabbits, one of many
unwelcome presents the British gifted Australia with. Or Highland cows (Latin:
Heelan’ Coos) that chewed the cud in Mongolia for millennia before they were
kidnapped to Scotland and made to produce toffee for people who couldn’t
otherwise afford tooth extraction. I am fascinated by what we can and cannot
learn from our neighbours, what will and will not take root abroad. There is an
obvious advantage offered here: rather than launch costly (and no doubt
unethical) vast social experiments in different education systems to work out
which ones are most effective, we can just peer over the border and see what
our neighbours are up to. In theory.

I learned a lot (my bar is low, and like a pupil on a G
grade I make fastest progress) from Australia and the two researchEDs we put
together in Melbourne, one at Brighton Grammar School and one in partnership
with the ACE conference. Hundreds of teachers, school leaders, academics,
researchers, and everyone else in between self-assembled to learn from one
another and the fantastic array of speakers who had given their time for free
to talk to their colleagues.

There were too many to mention of thank here, but some
highlights that I managed to get to were:

Professor John Sweller, famous forhis work on Cognitive Load
theory and developing Geary’s idea of Biologically Primary and Secondary Knowledge,
which has proven to be increasingly influential in our understanding of why
some forms of teaching may or may not be more or less effective in different contexts.
His quiet, patient unpacking of his topic contrasted enormously with….

John Hattie, who is as close to a rock star in
edu-conferences as you’ll find. I believe he and Dylan Wiliam are opening the Pyramid
stage on Glastonbury next year. His grasp of meta-studies and the energetic,
passionate enthusiasm with which he delivers it, make him one of our best
communicators in education. Inevitably, one so prominent attracts criticism: for the 0.4 hinge effect
size, the nature of meta studies, and so on. But he is undeniably one of our
most important voices in the Great Debate, and rightly feted as a giant in the
canon.

Katie Roberts Hull from Learning First, who talked about Evidence
Based Professional Learning and the implications for effective practice. In many
ways this seemed to echo some of the excellent work done by the Teacher
Development Trust in this field. Her idea that professional learning needs to
be sustained over a long period, and connected to a learning goal, echoed
deeply with me, when I see so much CPD and INSET based on a snapshot model
where teachers spend a day at a Novotel taking away a bag of notes and often
little else.

Tanya Vaughan from Social Ventures Australia, along with
John Bush, was spreading the gospel of the Teaching and Learning Toolkit, and
carefully explaining the significance of the lock, the dollar and the months-progress
ideas. I hope she’s ready for years of people still asking what they mean like
the UK.

Jennifer Buckingham heads up the CIS’s ‘Five for Five
project’, which promotes the five main aspects of reading instruction that
comprise our best evidenced practice. The resistance to this internationally is
extraordinary, and even more extraordinary when you consider the enormous evidence
in its favour. It’s a Sisyphean task at times, but when literacy is at stake, a
vital one, and people like Jennifer are goddamn heroes for batting on their
behalf against the snake oil dingos.

Greg Ashman. Australia’s deadpan knight errant, and for my
money one of the best bloggers writing about education in the game. Prolific,
spiky and usually dead on. He’s one of my must-follows for anyone interested in
the intersection between practice and theory.

Stephen Norton delivered a brilliant keynote on maths
instruction, international comparisons between pedagogy, and the relative
merits of enquiry versus explicit instruction. The results, it had to be said,
were not in enquiry’s favour.

And Stephen Dinham. And Pam Snow, and Ben Evans…and too many
others to mention. A huge thanks to Helen Pike and ACE for making the whole trip
possible, to Brighton Grammar School for giving until it hurt, and to all the
speakers who gave their time so freely. Kindness and generosity frequently
makes the miraculous possible.

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I took part in a fascinating
panel for the Wellington Festival of Education last week. Myself, Laura
McInerney, Maria Arpa and Katherine Birbalsingh were quizzed about behaviour in
schools (watch it here). Within about two minutes lines were drawn and it was game on.

Of course any attempt to reduce
anything as complex as human behaviour to a coin toss of possible answers risks
bleeding it dry of the complexity that makes it a conundrum rather than a pop
quiz. Do what you’re told, or do what you want? Compliance or defiance?
Autonomy or lobotomy? A lot of debate about behaviour barrels around these
poles like flies around a lampshade. They make better headlines than strategy.

Never mind the hyperbole

The first question was ‘Is there
a behaviour crisis?’ I would say it’s not obvious because the word is problematic. Crisis implies an emerging situation under so much pressure it
cannot bear much more before it collapses or explodes. I think the behaviour
problem is real, deep and tragic precisely because it isn’t that; in fact, it’s endured
for decades and can continue to do so, gasping and grasping from the sick bed.
McInerney mentioned Alasdair Campbell, who only
considered it a crisis if the military had to be called in. (Perhaps we should
be more worried by the Troops to Teachers program than we think?)

Katherine Birbalsingh, who can
normally be counted on to barnstorm like Elijah, was as mild-mannered as someone
with Xanax in their Special K. Turns out she was just stretching out like a Sumo. She broke into a jog when asked
what the main behaviour problem was. “It’s not just TA’s being assaulted’ she
said. ‘It’s the low-level disruption, You see them on the buses, and we’ve just
come to accept the behaviour. '

'Children push,’ she said. ‘We push back.’ And I
could hear her angry fan club on social media set their blog-phasers to ‘gnash’.

Maria Arpa said she
thought children shouldn’t be expected to be just behave. They had to want to
behave. This is certainly a laudable ambition. The obvious bogeyman to contrast
this with is compliance, that pantomime villain of behaviour management. Compliance
connotes so negatively, doesn’t it? Coercion, oppression, subjugation. It’s an
egregious word the instant it tumbles from your lips.

The appliance of compliance

But I think we can reform it a
little. For me, compliance is the first step in a ladder that takes children to
extraordinary heights of habit way beyond mere slavish adherence to convention
and into the realms of independently reasoned decisions. But before we can get
there we need children, on those first rungs of maturity, wisdom and social
awareness, to comply with moral rules, set for their benefit and the mutual
benefit of all. I don’t discuss with a three-year-old whether or not to hit a peer
while there’s any chance of it happening. No; at first, I forbid and prohibit,
and explain why elsewhere. These combinations of prohibitions and admonitions
become a set of habits, which become character. If these guidelines are good
and useful, the child acquires useful and good habits of character, which are
portable, and live on in them long after the teachable moments.

In fact, not to do this, and not
to expect compliance, is a disservice to the child and an abdication of the
precious duty we have to raise our children with every advantage possible.
Sure, it sounds great in theory that we could reason our every ethical dilemma
with children every time, but this misses two key issues. a) We only partially
reason rationally. Much of what we consider to be our wise judgement, is an
emotional response. And b) It just isn’t practical. What if they simply
disagree with us? What if, after all our lovely discussion, children simply
want to pursue their own self-interest? This is called the Free Rider problem,
and is the reason why, even though it might seem in everyone’s interests to be
good, so many people aren’t. If you were perfectly rational you might conclude
that the wisest course would be for everyone else to be moral, and for you to
be wily and wicked, and exploit the poor saps.

And this is why reason and
patience alone will not make us moral. At some point, we simply need to
instruct children to be so, and expect it, and alongside all the lovely
conversations about kind hands and how do you think Tariq felt when you did
that, there has to be oceans of you just can’t and because I said so.

Michaela School, yesterday

Arpa said she wanted to get rid
of behaviour management from teacher training, and half-jokingly I suggested
that her wish had already been granted. Some providers do a great job, but
there are still too many ITT platforms that de-emphasise behaviour management,
or teach queer platitudes that are at best useless and at worst harmful: things
like ‘try to make them laugh,’ or ‘There’s no such thing as bad behaviour, just
a badly planned lesson,’ or one of my favourites, ‘Every behaviour is a
communication,’ which might be true, but often what’s being communicated is ‘I
fancy a bit of fun at someone else’s expense.’ It’s something I’m working to
change, with the work we did as part of the ITT review into behaviour management
training.

Do it- or I'll tell you to do it again

I agree that discussion is a more
lovely way to encourage social behaviour than enforcement. But the simple,
stark and stone-cold truth is that it isn’t an efficient way to run a community
beyond two or three people. We all have very different ideas about right and
wrong; we dispute every term imaginable, from justice to equality to good
manners. If we left it to individuals to work out what each meant every time we
needed to think about it, life would be a series of struggles that would
consume our every instant.

Cultures thrive on shared understandings
of what is meant by good conduct. Watch children howl as you apply one rule for
one person but not for another. You simply can’t get students to all agree what
the right thing to do is, even if you negotiate with them. For a start, some
children will simply disagree about the rules of conduct, or lateness, or
homework, if you let them co-create it. And every time you defer the
responsibility of decision to a pupil you undermine the authority of the
teacher to regulate and monitor the culture of the classroom. And that means
you can’t keep them safe. It means you can’t provide what they need the most; a
calm space where they know they are valued, free from bullying and
interference, and free to learn and flourish.

Because what are consequences if
not a way to show students that their actions matter? That they are not
invisible? That someone cares about what they do? Some decry sanctions. Arpa
calls them ‘Violence.’ My eyeballs almost spun in their sockets and my face made
a very serviceable OMG GIF. This could not be further from the truth. She, and
many who share her view, believe that systems based on rules and consequences
breed violence; endorse violence; multiply violence. I think this stretches the
concept of violence so far it snaps like a banjo string. If rules have no consequences
attached to their infraction, then even the simplest of children realises
quickly there is no rule at all.

Consequences are like the alarm bell that
stops you reversing into a bollard on your car; an uncomfortable reminder that
a poor choice is being made. There are many other reactions one can have to
good or bad behaviour- sanctions and rewards are only two arrows in a quiver
that quivers with possibility, from conversations, to meetings to education to interventions.
But they are an essential- not optional- part of how we mould and help sculpt
young adults into better versions of themselves.

I've seen things you wouldn't believe

Arpa is a sincere, intelligent and
deeply caring person, committed to the well-being of children and adults. But
these ideas are part of the reason why we have such intemperate and
inconsistent behaviour in schools today. We train teachers not nearly enough in
effective ways to anticipate and resolve challenge at a structural level. We
offer no guaranteed training to school leaders who want guidance in creating
effective school cultures. And far, far too much of the advice on offer where
it does exist, is of this variety: that rules are oppressive, that children
will thrive if only we granted them more and more autonomy.

Neither are complex enough to be
true rather than merely pretty and pious platitudes. Children desperately need
us; they need adult guidance. That requires us to be adults; to admit our responsibilities
and take them seriously. Far too often we are advised in these matters by
well-meaning people who have never had to deal with the reality of thirty, not
a few children, in a teaching rather than a therapeutic context.

Teach the children you have, not the ones you want

There was a sensible question at
the end. Could you run a society on principles of restorative justice? And of
course, the answer is no. No society ever has. You simply can’t expect large
communities to self-regulate through reasoned discussion. It would be lovely,
but it’s a utopian fantasy. And the sad reality of utopias is that when they go
wrong, it’s never the wealthy who suffer most, but the people it was intended
to emancipate. Its why we have prisons and police rather than enormous voucher
reward schemes for M&S.

Rules optimise justice and
stability. Broken rules need to be mended and reinforced. People are imperfect.
We can strive for a more perfect community, but not on a cloud of enthusiastic
but impractical fantasy. In every teacher movie, broken urchins are healed by
the love of a teacher who never gave up on them. That’s true, but if we don’t
also teach them how to behave, then all we’re doing is hugging them into poverty.

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An interesting and problematic study from Northern Ireland about iPads
in early-years settings hit the interweb today. Interesting because it makes
some extraordinary claims about their efficacy that, if true and replicable,
could revolutionise the way we teach in those settings; and problematic because that ‘if’ has
a lot of heavy lifting to do.

The study ‘Mobile Devices in Early Learning’ was carried out
for two years and involved 650 pupils in five Belfast primary schools and five
nursery schools.

‘Schools which took part were in some of the most deprived
areas of the city.They were each supplied with sets of iPads for nursery,
primary one, primary two and primary three classes.’ (1)

What did they find? Fans of chalk boards and cuneiform look
away now:

The
introduction of digital technology has had a positive impact on the
development of children's literacy and numeracy skills

Contrary
to initial expectations, principals and teachers report that the use of iPads
in the classroom has enhanced children's communication skills

Children
view learning using handheld devices as play and are more highly
motivated, enthused and engaged

Boys
appear to be more enthused when using digital technology, particularly
when producing pieces of written work (2)

Impressive stuff, and these findings represent prizes we all
value: improved gateway skills, engagement, enjoyment, motivation. Game over
for sceptics surely? Alas, one Boss-level obstacle remains. Is it true?

The quotes above are taken from a news website, which
only describes the authors' findings. But in order to understand if
the research findings are robust, and that they flow from the iPad
intervention, we need to be able to access methodology, study design,
attainment measures and so on. We need to hear a critical voice to contract with the claims. Otherwise we could just say anything.

Thrilling sub-heading supported by weak evidence in paragraph 14

What’s wrong with reporting like this? In my opinion, it's unhelpful. In fact I think taken as a whole it makes the business
of knowing how to educate children harder. Because if we want to make sure that what we do
with children in classrooms is useful rather than frivolous, it’s important
that claims of efficacy are matched by evidence, and extraordinary claims
matched by extraordinary evidence. This project set the Belfast Regeneration
Project back £300K, with change back for a Solero- or a teacher’s salary for a
decade if you prefer. School budgets are finite systems and getting more finite
by the year.

'Sir! This intervention appears to based on weak findings.'

When we report unconfirmed results like this without
challenge, the intellectual landscape of education discourse is changed subtly.
This news report will be cited somewhere, by someone who wants to bring a cache
of iPads into a school, and someone somewhere will say ‘OK’. That’s great if
they have the effect they claim, but what if they don’t? At best a waste of
money and time. In fact, that’s also the ‘at worst’ scenario, because children-
especially children in deprived areas, don’t have second chances, or time for
expensive substitutes for teaching time. When we report research without
question, it enter the collective psyche as factual: ‘iPads make kids smarter
and happier.’ But what if they don’t? And I don’t have skin in this game. I
love iPads. But I also loved Tom Hardy’s performance in Taboo, and I’m not
using that in any lessons soon because there is no obvious reason for me to do
so.

Show me the money

Ok, so go beyond the slightly breathless news report. Where is the
research itself?

The article doesn’t link to anything we can look at, so a
quick search reveals that this study is:

‘Gray, C., Dunn, J., Moffett, P., & Mitchell, D. (2017).
Mobile devices in early learning. Developing the use of portable devices to
support young children's learning. Stranmillis University College: A College of
The Queen's University of Belfast, 24.05.2017’

To the website, Robin. Over at Stranmillis University
College, we find a link to a press release, where one of the report’s author’s
makes these claims:

“The study’s findings showed that, in the five participating
schools, all of which were located in catchment areas of high social
deprivation and academic under-achievement, the introduction of digital
technology has had a positive impact on the development of pupil literacy and
numeracy skills. And, contrary to initial expectations, principals and teachers
also reported that their use had enhanced children’s communication skills,
acting as a stimulus for peer to peer and pupil to teacher discussion.” (3)

There’s a link at the bottom of this breathless
review, but it doesn’t work- happily the study is elsewhere on the website (4).

1. Completely subjective self-reporting: If you were hoping to find some evidence that children's literacy or numeracy had been demonstrably improved in an objective way, you will go home with empty pockets. All the evidence collected in this areas was in the form of semi-structured interviews with teachers, school principals, student focus groups and parental questionnaires. So the teachers (small focus groups from each of the 5 schools and pre-schools) said things like 'I think they've improved their literacy.' How do we know this? How can we separate any gains from normal progress, or progress attributable to other interventions or processes?

2. Questionnaire response rate: 27% (after a second push- the first response was 8%), which seems to my mind to be a poor response. We have no way of knowing how representative this is (although I'll suggest 'not very')

3. Possible design biases: schools were selected to participate in this project based on their commitment to the project, their pre-existing use of ICT and iPads in the school, and their commitment to use iPads in the future, as well as a troubling commitment to 'The benefits of developing literacy and numeracy skills to be gained from the use of iPads.' So, to summarise: schools that were enthusiastic about iPads, already used them and believed they had big educational benefits, participated. 'Person who likes x, thinks x is good' isn't so much a research finding as a disappointing maxim in a fortune cookie.

4. Variable usage: schools used them at different times, with different apps, in different ways, with different children. In some schools they were used more than others. It seems very hard to discern if like is being compared with like.

5. Funding. This whole program came about because the Belfast Educational & Library Board was awarded a grant from the Belfast Regeneration Office to 'develop an ICT program.' Was there sufficient critical examination of the need to do so in the first place? Every study needs to suspend disbelief in its own utility, and question its own existence.

6. No control group. What is this intervention better than?

Duvet days: no longer a get-out from teaching.

This study' findings may well be found to be correct, and I’m
sure that the authors and everyone involved has the best of intentions and
conducted themselves with scruples and integrity. That’s not in question. But questions
are all we have at this stage. All we are holding in our hands is a fog of
grand claims and optimism. Do iPads turn frowns upside down? Do they turn light
bulbs on above confused heads? Are they just a novelty or a distraction? We can’t
tell, not from this. A day of terrific press is great for
the University, but doesn’t help the debate.

Never mind the quality, feel the tech

I’ve looked at a lot of research that often gets used to
support positive claims for the utility of tech in the classroom, and often
they don’t stand up in court. Some of the most duplicitous research I have read
in this area uses proxies of success that are entirely subjective or impossible
to substantiate. ‘tech has the potential to do x’ is the same as ‘tech has not
done x yet.’ And ‘boys appear to be more enthused when using digital technology’
could be uncharitably responded to with a ‘so what?’ and a ‘oh really?’ and a 'did it take a £500 iPad to do that?'

And that’s important, because schools are poor and kids don’t
often get second chances when they come from deprived areas. Universal, free education
is one of humanity’s greatest inventions. Wasting that is a sin, and a theft
from people with nearly nothing. Who would rob a child, from a family with nothing
but debt?

Other people's children

Public money needs to be spent as carefully as if it were
our own. Other people’s children need to be taught as carefully as if they belonged
to us. No child should endure the loss of their right to an education, no
matter how digitally it is dressed. If iPads and their ilk can bring benefit
to the table, then let them demonstrate it in public. Let everyone see how well
they work, and if they do, the truth will be unmistakeable. But when claims are
made without data that substantiates it appropriately then we have a right to ask if our money is being spent wisely. This matters. Ominously, the report suggest that:

'These findings should inform the future rollout of similar initiatives and will be of interest to practitioners, policy-makers and parents.'

Ireland, I love you. My family migrated from Ireland. I wish you and your beautiful island nothing but fortune and love. For the good of your children, and the wealth of your nation, and the prospect of better things to come, I suggest that you use these findings wisely. Keep your hands away from the cheque books for now and wait until better data supports swapping out precious resources for digital magic beans.

I'll end with a lovely quote from Piaget, which starts the report:

'The principal goal of education is to create men and women who are capable of doing few things, not simply of repeating what other generations have done—men and women who are creative, inventive, and discoverers, who have minds which can be critical, can verify, and not accept everything they are offered (Piaget,1973).'